DAVID BYRNE AT CARNEGIE HALL: DON'T FENCE HIM IN

by Jonah Ansell, Rival Room Producer

After attending David Byrne's Carnegie Hall Perspectives Series performance this past Saturday night, one thing is clear: David Byrne doesn't want you to remember him as the lead singer of The Talking Heads.

Why be concerned with how history pigeonholes this pop icon? The title of his latest project, "Here Lies Love" is the phrase that Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines and subject of Saturday's performance, hoped to have engraved on her tombstone. So, might there be a phrase that encompasses all that is Byrne?

Our modern media machine has bred a society that settles for shorthand. As a result, one's entire existence can be satisfactorily explained by simply aligning a name (i.e. David Byrne) with that person's most salient correlating accomplishment (The Talking Heads). Take a look at the "Obituaries" in your local newspaper and you'll see Grandma Jezebel's 93 amazing years reduced to a sentence fragment. 93 years of kicking around on this planet and you're lucky if you get two verbs.

As humans, we're defined by the salient, packageable events of our lives. Often, the salient act to which you are linked is:

a) the act that first brought you into the public eye

b) the act which generated the most profits for you (or a larger corporate hand)

c) your participation in an act of reproduction, that places you neatly into a culutral category (i.e. the 93-year-old in the Obituary section, becomes cemented in time as "grandmother to" or "mother of." These labels become ticky-tacky little boxes on a linguistic hillside that enable us to order our world. And without order, what do we have?

David Byrne.

Last month, Will Hermes of the New York Times attempted to update Byrne's label, recognizing that "former frontman of the Talking Heads" was no longer cutting it. Hermes' headline coined Byrne as Indie Rock's Patron Saint.

The jury is still out to whether this moniker is going to stick, but already, I view this as a flawed attempt to place a single snare drum into the hands of an individual who on this past Saturday night, just so happened to be marching to Brazillian and Latin percussions in addition to Fat Boy-slim-designed techno beats. Byrne's influence runs deeper than this year's class of likely chart toppers, in fact, it goes beyond music altogether.

Hermes' labeling attempt is only slightly better than how Fortune 500 execs might pigeonhole Byrne. Corporate America would boil him down to: a man who wears many hats. But Byrne would likely take one of those hats and turn it into a flower bed, photograph it, hook it up to the infrastructure of a light post, and release it as a public art exhibit somewhere around Montreal. To attempt to label him is the first mistake, although I too will attempt to make that mistake. I believe that Byrne may be the best human embodiment of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that the harder we aim to describe/define, the less we actually understand.

To circumvent the shorthand that fails to sufficiently credit Byrne's vast post-Heads contributions to music, film, art and literature, prestigious outlets such as the NYTimes will use prestigious words, a la "idiosyncratic," or "polymath," to describe Byrne -- disguising their heuristics with words that impress your intelligence. We're you impressed by that sentence, were you, were you? Me neither. See, the thing is, you can't describe Byrne in a word. Or a phrase.*

Now, Byrne won't admit to you what he is striving to NOT be remembered as, or at least didn't tell us this over the course of this past Saturday in New York City, where he stayed mostly in the backdrop even when performing his own music. However, as recounted in his online journal, Byrne sheds some light onto how he views his layman's label. At a social gathering in May of 2005, Byrne was introduced by his friend (the artist Sophie Calle) to a fellow party-goer as "the guy from Talking Heads." Later that night, Calle took him aside and apologized, saying:

"You must get that all the time, your life condensed to something you did years ago, it happens to me too — I’m the girl who follows people. We will never escape these things.”

Byrne went on to reflect on what it's like for his public identity to exist beneath such a weighty, archaic label:

"Gee, I guess I am just used to it — I didn’t much notice, it happens all the time — I realize it has become a kind of shorthand even though I do squirm a bit whenever it happens, but I also accept it. At least it’s something I’m proud of. Sophie mentioned a friend of hers who has been kidnapped and another who was kidnapped some years ago — one is a well known and respected journalist, but from now on will inevitably only be known as “the kidnapped journalist.” So at least some of us are known for something we ourselves did and not just something that happened to us — the poor journalist, if she survives, will have to deal with being known less for her writing and courageous work than for a nasty bit of circumstance."

Byrne is right. Many of us can't control the "nasty bit of circumstance" that labels us to the outside world. Gary Condit. Natalie Holloway. Kato Kaelin. Most of us are probably remembered to our immediate communities of acquaintences by something goofy that happened to us in high school. And even if we're lucky enough to become one of the Spin Doctors' of the world, most of us struggle to ever move beyond the one "hit" that helped us graze the map.

But with each of Byrne's latest creative contributions, which in recent years have been markedly playful, observational and socially critical (see his postmodern response to The Gideons in his 2002 Bible replacement, The New Sins), he is striving beyond the confines of the adjective. Striving to be anything but a Talking Head. Not running from his past, just choosing to not be bound by it. Nor trying to milk it for financial gain (read: The Rolling Stones).

This was apparent during his Saturday night performance of his work-in-progress (read: future Tony-Award winning Broadway Play) "Here Lies Love," a musical piece about the life and reign of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines.

See a clip from Saturday's show here, and listen as Byrne's enchanting lyrics eerily and powerfully fill the space, floating to the ceiling like Charlie and Grandpa in the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.



In between the night's twenty or so songs, Byrne talked directly to the audience, relaying quirky tidbits from Marco's life. Yet, for much of the night, the spotlight seemed to be elsewhere. Byrne's infamous dance steps were played down, paving the way for Joan Almedilla and Ganda Suthivarakom, two lead female vocalists who played the parts of Marcos and Marcos' nanny. Aside from a triumphant reprise of "Here Lies Love" to close the show, where Byrne took the reigns as lead vocalist, his stage presence was notably subdued when compared with his Big Suit days, or even his more recent 2004 performance at Bonnaroo. And although he stepped aside to let the music ultimately speak for him, it was his presence that people heard.

Critics and fans seemingly agree that the lens of Marcos is an odd one, and given Byrne's insightful/politically/socially aware writings and artistic creations, it will be interesting to look for larger parables in the completed piece. Why center a piece around the opulent Marcos -- a woman who felt that it was her "duty" to be "some kind of light, a star to give [the poor] guidelines? Does this language not sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric President Bush has been spewing for the last four years? Out of fear of simplifying the larger metaphors in this piece, and the future completed piece, I will stop trying to draw conclusions. But I encourage other curious fans/critics to ask not only "Why Marcos?" but "Why now?"

But back to Byrne, the mastermind behind this song cycle. Despite its incomplete state, fans and critics remain so enamored with Byrne, and his continual creative risk-taking, that the only way they know how to respond to his humble presence is with standing ovations. Whether Byrne had played the entire, fully cast piece, or if he'd simply stood on stage while Bonobos banged on 1987 Casio keyboards, the Carnegie Hall audience would've called it "genius."

Not to say that Byrne's half-finished piece of work didn't deserve the standing ovations, as the music is truly beautiful, original and stimulating. If you don't trust me, just ask the 30-something-acid-tripper in the row behind me who had to be carried out of Carnegie Hall after an erratic whistle began to play during one of the songs. Ok fine, decide for yourself by watching this video from Saturday's show (thanks guy from YouTube):



When Byrne is on stage, whether he is subdued or unleashed, he is mesmerizing, beyond a level of which I think even he is aware. Perhaps it's his humble nature, which sticks out like mayonnaise on a hot pastrami sandwich in our Mountain Dew Code Red marketing era. Fans and critics know only how to applaud, to praise. Even the elites over at the New York Times couldn't help but write a glowing review, as the writer became more encapsulated with the vision of what this show might become than what it currently was. Again, credit the power of Byrne, who precedes himself to such a degree that prevents us from rationing our praise.

To understand this unbridled praise, let's take a cue from unbridled punishment, where judges and juries will dole out 10 life sentences to the foulest criminals, when one life sentence will suffice. Criminals who are so heinous that we only know how to spit and sneer, no matter where they are in the given moment. Byrne is just the opposite, an artist who has created so much, that no matter where he or his music is in a given moment, fans and critics only know how to applaud.

I don't know how Byrne's tombstone will read. I imagine I might get off easy, as he's not likely one to be bound by an archaic burial practice. But I do know that a few words, or a few thousand words, won't get it right.

*To read David Byrne's own views on the limitation of words and labels, read this entry from 11/20/05.